On Introversion.

Have you ever tried not talking to anyone, not another living soul, for a week? Longer? It can be difficult.

Have you tried talking after that? It's even worse.

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I've mentioned in passing how I can get very tired of people. Not fed up with somebody, or upset or anything like that, just exhausted by the very idea of socialising. Don't get me wrong; I love people. Especially the ones I have in my life right now. But I can get tired. Very easily.
In every venue I had to visit regularly- halls, clubs, other people's houses- I have a sanctuary that I've found, and will visit regularly. Cupboards, spare rooms, bathroom stalls, just somewhere to be alone. I remember being in an unfamiliar club one night, and it was just so busy. I had lost everyone I knew trying to find some refuge, and ended up trying to leave through the fire escape- before getting physically hauled back in by bouncers. I still don't know why bouncers would try and keep "unruly" customers inside. I thought that was the opposite of what they did.

The worst I've felt it was maybe a couple of months ago. I'm not entirely sure why it happened, but it did. I just couldn't bear the thought of seeing anybody. And to complicate matters, the more I stayed in my hidey-hole, the harder it was to get out, as if each passing moment in my room was making myself more of a wretch than I was before, something I couldn't show anybody. I stopped sleeping right. I ate my meals in private, when people were long asleep. Hallmates assumed I was absent. I felt like I was festering.
I remember accidentally running into a friend one night, as I had to pick something up from another kitchen- he had a similar aversion to sleep- and I couldn't speak. Couldn't. I was struck like frightened prey, and the only sound my throat would make were scratched, wounded noises. Like a whispered howl. And so, with eyes affixed to the floor, I hastily scurried away.


I have no illusions how pathetic it was. I would hear people, friends, passing my door, and I would freeze in panic. Cold sweats. If somebody had knocked or wanted something, I really wouldn't know what to do.
I was blindsided by the prospect of having to communicate with another human being- people I knew and admired.


I vomited twice the day I decided I would leave my room. Which was fine by me, it gave me an excuse put off my task for the day. I think I went through the entire morning routine of teeth-face-shower-hair-clothes about three times over six hours.
But it went fine.
They didn't ask too many questions, they smiled, we talked. It went fine.


I'm still frightened of when it will strike again. Or of how much I've alienated those close to me with my isolation. Of how ungrateful, inconsiderate I must appear to my friends. I'm not. I love them, I need them.  It's difficult to tell if this new unease I feel is just me.

I believe knowledge is a responsibility

as is the sharing of it. There is information that should be freely available to everyone. There should be public access to every religious text, enlightening or disgusting, and every paperback that damns them, well-intentioned or not. We should be able to know everything that happened on every warfront, what happened beyond enemy lines and beneath government censor. I struggle to think of a single book that deserves burning. Even if the information inside is horrendous or criminal, it should be released, to those who want it. The solution isn't suppressing lies, but releasing truth. I'll burn the house of someone who withholds Mein Kampf just as soon as the house of whoever suppresses The Catcher in the Rye.
(Can you believe how relevant this is so far to current events? Just noticed. I'm so good)

But I also believe that there is knowledge we hide everyday, rightly. Some things are best left alone. I'm finding it hard to tell the difference between information I shouldn't share, or can't.

My fears have come true.

I knew that as soon as I had a private outlet, not only would this blug start to crumple, but so would my ability to blug. I'm not sure what this means for me. Have I become too guarded about myself now? I fear that my more secretive habits have closed off one of my only real ways of communicating the things I struggle to compose in speech. Perhaps now I have no real way of feeding titbits to snoopers.
Of course, there remains an alternative hypothesis.
It could always be that my thoughts just aren't as readable as the once were.
I may have become the kind of person who has thoughts and ideas and feelings that shouldn't be shared.
Here's hoping I haven't.
On the other hand, despite the retreat of my written word, my musical shortcomings are at least gaining some attention. Of course, I daren't play any of the songs that I write for myself, despite the misplaced pride I get from them. I think I'd need a more anonymous outlet for those, if I ever were to do anything with them. But hey. Baby steps. They're pretty dumb as songs go. There's this certain note I want to hit, this idea of placing a very universal feeling or emotion into these little stories, trying to sing about something really honest. I don't want to write songs about love at first sight and being whisked away to a heaven in your arms, I want to write songs about throwing rocks at girls 'cos you like them and you don't know what else to do.
It doesn't bear well for me that my desire for total unpretentiousness still sounds utterly pretentious.
University's different, University's great. It constantly surpasses every expectation I had for the place. The people are some of the best I've ever encountered, Every time someone leaves a room, I want to whisper about how much I love them. They haven't stalked me enough to have found this blug, probably, or at least have given no indication that they have, so that's a plus. It's hard though. Trying to learn all these new rules and limits and conventions I have to meet to keep favour or to not offend is quite taxing. I've started taking notes.
I'm pretending I know what I'm doing a lot though. I really don't know. Not at all. I'm being thrust from situation to situation that I've never had to deal with before (or have refused to deal with at far lower stakes) and I don't have any answers, or at the very least, the resolve to carry out what piteous solutions I can muster. I'm sure I'm slipping up a lot, hurting feelings, being completely evasive about things I should be, well, confrontational about. In fairness, it's not exactly a new issue. But it's something that is probably more important now than any other time I've done this. Sensitivity in communication is something I have always completely lacked. I lack words the one time they'd make a difference (me without a mouthful of shit to say is a sound to hear), and always catch myself falling into the same clichés that I would secretly damn someone else for using. Hell, my tone of voice skips "genuine" and goes straight to "patronising".
But I'll learn and manage. Or pretend to, convincingly enough.

I don't really want to write something in particular

but I do want to write. What that usually means is that either I have too much half-formed crap swirling in my head that I need to remove and rearrange until I'm happy with it, or that I want to write about something but don't want to admit to myself what it is. I don't know which of these it is, but hopefully it'll become somewhat apparent to me as this goes on.

It feels a little Caulfield-esque, to be honest, and it's how I've been feeling for a while. That pent up, confused feeling towards something, and you don't really know what, but you know you're feeling something, that there's some issue or revelation that you know you could address so poignantly, if only you could comprehend it. Alarm bells normally ring once teenage losers start empathising with Holden Caulfield; it's usually one of those phases, like those brief boons of political idealism that inflates kids with up with subsistent revolutionism which, once tempered by adolescent rebellion, swiftly departs as hot air, leaving the vessel as flat as this contrived metaphor.

That's not to say such idealism is wrong and should be looked down upon- it has its place as a learning mechanism, one which can not be fully utilised without genuineness (are you a word?).

I called a friend a bee the other day, and she was pissed because I didn't say butterfly. Which is bullshit because bees are so much better. I'm not a butterfly fan- there's just something so insipid about their supposed beauty. There's nothing to it. But bees, bees are fantastic. Bees create. Hives are wonderful things- at once alien and natural, complex yet elegant. The geometry is not only divine, but functional, integral. Deviations in cell depth, size, shape are pre-determined contingency plans for the next generation of hatchlings which are recognised silently by every member of the hive. Butterflies consume their whole (short) life, Bees create. Right down to pollination. Spreading flowers here, there and everywhere. Now they've got Apollonian and Dionysian beauty going for them. *Bam*.

I've been thinking a lot about those two concepts as well, partly due to a nice little primer on Nietzsche I've been chipping away at. Order and Chaos. A lot of people make a big deal about putting themselves on one side of the divide, often without knowing it, but the only thing that separates the two is time. If rudimentary mathematics has taught me anything, all chaos leads to order eventually. Which is nice. Scribble for as long as you want, and eventually, shape will form. Even if it only makes sense to you. I guess that's what I do when I write, anyhow. Reminds me of spirographs.

I'm getting really worn out by people recently. Not that my friends and acquaintances are tiring, just that everyone is tiring.

Or rather, everyone tires me.

I tire of everyone.

The problem is me, alright?

More and more often I find myself escaping home early, or retreating to some room to study or work. That's the problem with seeing people so often for so long, you start to not miss them, which leads to the tiring, the unappreciating, it leads to me thinking things that I'm ashamed to think sometimes. For a vast majority of people I know, I'm fully aware that after I move I'm going to feel so relieved, and that I will make no attempt to meet up with them. I won't avoid such occurrences, naturally, but there's a good chance that this will be the last I'll see of any of them.

And I don't think that's a good thing to think. I really do feel guilty seeing them, and knowing what I think. But it doesn't make it any less true.

In case you hadn't noticed, I really enjoy these moments of Anagnorisis sown from past misinterpretations.

Of all the idioms I had come to detest, "You can't have your cake and eat it too" was high up there, along with malformed phrase "I could care less". I just couldn't stand it. Why should you not be able to eat the cake? Utilitarian implications aside, isn't that the purpose of owning the cake? I could just never understand it.

I had not ever realised that this illogical confectionery fallacy was also butchered through time.

It turns out it was originally structured "You can't eat your cake and have it, too", and is perhaps most well known as Ayn Rand's response for a simple aphorism to her second, epistemological tenet of Objectivism, Reason.

I now like it more.

There's this fantastic Vignette in The Great Gatsby.

It's the one where the pragmatic Nick Carraway is being driven around by Jordan Baker, a careless Femme Fatale. He tells her, half joking, half serious, that she's so careless a driver, that she shouldn't even drive. She argues so long as she only meets careful drivers,

“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”

I realise only today that I've actually had this precise moment happen to me, right down to the wording, though we were more vulnerable- we were pedestrians. I can't believe I let such a moment pass without more immediate acknowledgement.

I'm really glad that it happened, though.

My Dream Girl Don't Exist (hopefully)

I was in a super-macho discussion once. The topic came onto "Dream Girls".

Actually, I believe they declared it "Most fuckable girl our imaginations can render".

They were discussing all these attributes that The Most Fuckable Girl would have. Long legs, long hair, big lips, shapely tits, the usual. When someone suggested something less physical, it never really got much further than "nice" and "nymphomaniac". You know the conversation.

(PS if you're female, don't even begin to pretend that all owners of XX chromosomes are so elite that they are beyond these discussions and daydreams.)

Anyways, it got me to thinking as well. My dreamgirl.

Well, let's get the base stuff out of the way. Pretty and cute without being hot. No cigarettes no tatoos no piercings. Personal: Has to like Disney. And video games. And maths. Can't like hip hop metal dubstep rap twilight soap operas clubbing. Can't be too religious, can't be too immoral, must like peanut butter, can't like it crunchy, hates wotsits....

And suddenly I'm in Hell.

This thing I've created, it would be made to perfectly fit ad suit me. And I would be enamoured. I would cite Love at first sight. It would be everything I wanted, and I would be complacent.

There'd be no Love.

How could there be?

Friendship is kindled from similarities, but Love is born of differences and clashes. They allow growth and understanding and compromise (and not the shitty sort).

What would I have?

The conversation would be the first thing to go.

After raising up each of our interests and confirming our mutual approval of each thing, we'd be stuck.

"Man, isn't _____ just the greatest?"

"Yeah, it is."

But with this girl, this perfect girl, how could I ever consider leaving her? She's perfect. We're soul-mates (as if this construction would have one). There would be no way I could tear myself from this safety. I'd have this half-assed, lukewarm happiness, and I'd think it was Love. I'd believe it. And any reaction against this hell, any stirrings of recognition and warning, would be shot down by my own "love" and introspection. Perfect girl is perfect, so anything bad must come from the only other component in the relationship. And how I would torture it until it was fitting of this perfect girl.

And that's the scariest thought I've had in a while.